Observations on the laws governing the communication of contagious diseases : and the means of arresting their progress. Read before the Literary and Philosophical Society of New-York, on the 9th of June, 1814.

  • Hosack, David, 1769-1835.
Date:
1815
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations on the laws governing the communication of contagious diseases : and the means of arresting their progress. Read before the Literary and Philosophical Society of New-York, on the 9th of June, 1814. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by the National Library of Medicine (U.S.), through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the National Library of Medicine (U.S.)

    53/88
    If a febrile disease has for its cause, an aura, a gaseous fluid, emanating from the body of a man labouring under that fever, which will manifest activity only within a certain, generally definable, distance from that body, how can we with any propriety of concep- tion or language, say, that such a disease is only communicable through the medium of an impure atmosphere ? Again, is not a fever proceeding from the action of marsh mias- mata different from the fever we have just been considering, inasmuch as the one is not communicable—the other is certainly communicable from the subject of it to be a healthy subject ? How then can we admit such a proposition as the following: In an impure air, rendered so by the decomposition of animal and vegetable substances, as takes place in marshy countries, or by concentrated human effluvia, as in camps, jails, hospitals, or on shipboard, they (your third class) are rendered, not only extremely malignant and mor- tal in themselves, but become communicable to others who approach the sick, or breath the same atmosphere which has become assimilated to Hie poison introduced, insomuch, that the same specific disease is communicated, whether it be plague, yellow fever, typhus, or dysentery ? Pardon me when I say I do not understand this; when I say I perceive a marked inconsistency in it; several causes of an opposite nature producing effects all partaking of one general principle, contagion. Is not this a very near approach to the heterogeneity I have apprehended ? I suspect that dysentery does not come with marked propriety into the same class with plague, yellow fever, (malignant pestilential,) and ty- phus, for it is certainly oftener the product of marshes than morbid animal effluvia, and partakes very often of the type of intermittents. When I thus object to your classifi- cation as it relates to pyrexious contagions, I fully admit the occurrence of hybrid fevers, that is, contagious fevers with the types of those we know to proceed from the action of marsh miasmata. But on these occasions, all the conditions which constitute pyrexious contagions are present; their form is only a little changed ; their nature is unaltered : they are communicable only within the radius of contagion. That plague, or yellow fever (by which I understand the fever to which I have given the name malignant pestilential,) more especially, are only communicable through the medium of an impure atmosphere ; that in a pure air, in large and well ventilated apartments, &c. they are not communicat- ed, or very rarely, are propositions which I much doubt, because they are most certainly in direct contradiction to my own experience. I speak more immediately concerning the malignant pestilential fever. Were this a fact sanctioned by universal experience, (for- give the pointed expression, it is only for your own eye,) the extirpation of this fever might, in general, be a very easy operation. But I have seen too many proofs of its con- tagion communicating itself to healthy persons in a pure atmosphere, to admit the vali- dity of your definition of it. If healthy persons, or persons possessing every internal